LANDERNEAU.- Henry Moore was one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century and the first British artist to become a global star during his lifetime. As the embodiment of post-war modernism, his art initiated the revival of sculpture in Great Britain, a movement that continues today. His sculptures are exhibited in many cities and museums throughout the world; their organic shapes continue to attract an ever growing audience and inspire new generations of artists. The exhibition at Landerneau traces his extraordinary life and career through a choice of emblematic works, most of which are on loan from the collection of the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green, where he lived and worked.

Training: The Beginnings of a Sculptor
In the early 1920s, Henry Moore studied at Leeds School of Art in the UK. This was where he learned drawing, but already his dream was to become a sculptor. At Moore’s request, the school director opened a sculpture department and for some time he was the only student. The teaching was somewhat academic, but a visit to the British Museum in London would open the artist’s eyes to a multitude of distant and unfamiliar civilizations, from which he drew new sources of inspiration. His drawings at that time already involved the human figure and the representation of the body, which would dominate his work in the years to come. For Moore, drawing was a superb tool for understanding sculpture.

The Temptation of Abstraction
The early 1930s were marked by formalistic experimentation in which schematization and simplification of the body tended towards abstraction. Moore, together with Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, helped to bring about the renaissance of British sculpture on a new and radically different path. Hepworth and Nicholson leaned towards purely geometric abstraction, whereas Moore’s compositions appeared to be more the result of a careful observation of nature. Moore readily participated in the different abstract movements of the time: The 7 & 5 Society, Unit One, and Circle, but refused to be hemmed into any systematization.

The majority of his works, including the most seemingly abstract ones, often “refer to human emotions” if not a more direct physical resemblance.

Surrealism
Surrealism, the movement founded by André Breton in 1924, would have a lasting impact on the French artistic scene by attracting the most avant-garde artists. It set out to promote the imaginary over the representation of the real. In 1936, Roland Penrose brought the movement to Great Britain by organizing the first International Surrealist Exhibition at New Burlington Galleries in London. Moore was part of the organising committee and exhibited seven of his works alongside the most famous artists of the time such as Dalí, Picasso, Miró, De Chirico, and Giacometti. Moore refused to choose between abstraction and surrealism – the two divergent movements of the time – convinced that “good art has always contained both surrealist and abstract elements”.

The War
On 3 September 1939, following the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, Great Britain then France declared war on Germany. At the outbreak of war, Moore, who had served in the British army during the First World War, was too old to enlist. France surrendered in June 1940 but Great Britain organized the battle to come. It was in this climate that Kenneth Clark, director of the War Artists Advisory Committee, called upon British artists, including Henry Moore, to act as witnesses of the human impact of war.

Between 1940 and 1941, Moore documented life in the underground stations that had been transformed into makeshift shelters for Londoners, who had gotten used to taking refuge there in the evening to shelter from the air raids on the city. Moore would make notes, then once back in his studio he would draw from memory the seated or lying down figures, plucked from this human tide, and literally transform them into archetypal figures. These drawings were exhibited across the UK giving Moore a prominent profile.

Celebrations
The beginning of the 1950s marked a new phase of intense reinvention in Moore’s work and saw the realization of pieces that had been left unfinished during the war. Moore had abandoned sculpture for drawing and was now returning to it with three particularly ambitious and completely different projects. Family Group, started in 1939, was the first group model that Moore realized at this scale. Asked to exhibit one at the Festival of Britain, the artist instead decided on a Reclining Figure in plaster cast for which he combined, for the first time, two sculpture techniques (modelling and direct carving). The following year, the coronation of Queen Elisabeth II provided the inspiration for King and Queen, a piece combining naturalistic elements and animalistic and archaic forms.

The Maquette Studio, Perry Green
Moore and his wife Irina moved to Perry Green, a few kilometres north-west of London, in a hamlet where he gradually annexed adjacent buildings transforming them into studios dedicated to different techniques. The maquette studio, located next to a huge meadow in which lambs and sculptures mingled, was the nerve centre of the artist’s intensive work to transform organic shapes into figures. Moore found that the model scale enabled a piece of work to be experienced in all its dimensions and in a single glance, by rotating it in his hand. When the model was ready, he could then enlarge it to the scale best suited to the site in which it was to be installed.

Architecture
The sculpture-architecture connection had preoccupied Moore since 1928, when he was commissioned to do a relief for a building in London. Considering that sculpture must inevitably have three dimensions, he reluctantly accepted this first commission. However, twenty-seven years later, he had another opportunity to realize a relief for a building in Rotterdam. Moore saw this as the opportunity to create a work of architectural scale through a monumental work covering the entire facade. These preparatory models, made from organic or mechanic elements found in and around his studio, were enlarged and integrated into the walls by Rotterdam craftsmen.

Stonehenge
Moore discovered the Neolithic site Stonehenge for the first time in 1921, after visiting the site at nightfall. Years later, between 1972 and 1973, Moore tried to recreate these suspended stones “in the moonlight” through a series of lithograph. The mysterious arches forming the structure of Stonehenge’s sandstone blocks inspired sculptures in which the organic and the mineral merge. Moore established a new connection between sculpture and landscape and from then on considered that sculptures should exist in the open air.

Standing Figures
The discovery of non-western art, especially African sculptures, had been a decisive element for Moore since the 1930s and continued to inspire him in the later periods. From these wood sculptures, Moore retained the need to work the material vertically, and their capacity to suggest a form of elevation. It is in this perspective that Moore ended up making upright forms of his reclining figures and carrying out the monolithic works that play with the effects of gravity. Starting with a piece of bone enlarged to the human scale or combining interior/exterior forms, it was through this verticality that Moore revisited the major themes of his work.

Mother and Child
Moore was obsessed by the mother and child motif to the extent that throughout his career he did several hundred versions in drawings and sculpture, ranging from the most naturalistic to the most abstract. The artist considered this theme to be the most universal and probably the oldest subject in the history of art. Although most of the representations “have this idea of the larger form in a protective relationship with the smaller form”, he also addressed the more animal aspect of this mother-child relationship, especially when the survival instinct of the new born pushes it to literally try and “devour its mother”. The birth of his only child Mary significantly contributed to renewing this central theme.

Monumental
Although Moore worked at the scale of the model, his works gradually grew in size over time. Sculptures got bigger, sometimes to monumental scale, but Moore focused less on monumentality and more on defining the scale that was most appropriate for the sculpture’s installation site. The reclining figures remain the central theme of his work from the early years and Moore constantly reinvented them in plaster, bronze or wood. Figuration brushes with abstraction and Moore became engaged in different directions at the same time, asserting a unique position free from any stylistic constraints.

Scenographic Creation
To evoke Henry Moore’s very particular link to the landscape and echo his vision of sculpture as “an outdoor art”, the FHEL invites two contemporary artists, Blaise Parmentier and Guillaume Pellay, to create a wall painting in the exhibition.

Blaise Parmentier (1983) and Guillaume Pellay (1987) are respectively living and working in La Courneuve and Brest. Since 2010, they regularly collaborate alongside with their own works. In 2013, in particular, they were in charge of research and the production of large wall paintings as part of a collective exhibition at the Ricard corporate foundation. They are both members of the Monstrare collective.